How do you feel when you click on a link and end up with “404 page not found” error? Broken links are annoying, and they create bad user experience. On top of that, its bad for your website’s SEO. Specially if those broken links are internal links to your own site. This can happen, particularly when moving a site to new domain name. In this article, we will show you how to fix broken links in WordPress to improve your site’s SEO.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t want to watch the video tutorial, then you can continue reading the text version below:
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Broken Link Checker plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » Link Checker page. The plugin will automatically start looking for broken links on your website in the background.
Depending on how much content you got on your site, it may take sometime to go through your posts and display the results.
Once it is done, you will see a link with the number of broken links found on the same page.
You can see the broken links by either clicking on that link or going to Tools » Broken Links page. Here you’ll see all the broken links detected by the plugin:
You can edit a URL right from broken links page, or you can edit the post they belong to. Alternately, you can also perform bulk actions like unlinking all broken links, fix redirects, mark as not broken, etc.
Once you are done fixing the broken links, you need to deactivate and uninstall the plugin. Broken Link Checker is a resource intensive plugin and using it to regularly check for broken links can slow down your website.
We recommend checking for broken links once every six months. As your website grows older, you will realize that lots of old posts have links to external sites that don’t exist any more.
By fixing those broken links you can improve user experience which will help reduce bounce rate and increase page views.
We hope this article helped you learn how to fix broken links in WordPress. You may also want to see our step by step ultimate WordPress SEO guide for beginners.
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